About Loretta Lux

Trained as a painter, Loretta Lux began experimenting with photography in 1999 and has since become known for her uncanny photographs of children. Her young subjects range in age from two to nine and are the sons and daughters of her friends. She dresses them in 1970s vintage clothing and poses them precisely; they appear inscrutable, poised between knowingness and innocence. “My work isn’t about these children,” she once explained. “You can recognize them, but they are alienated from their real appearance—I use them as a metaphor for innocence and a lost paradise.” Using Photoshop to manipulate the children’s appearances—exaggerating their features and imparting an otherworldly translucency to their skin—she places them into dreamlike landscape settings. Lux spends up to three months on each image, considering them to be more like paintings than photographs.